Tag Archive for Man Post

Here’s my husband of 27 years, Mark, with some of his Secrets to being a Lean and Fit 50 Year Old:)

Yes, that’s me in the picture. Look again. I just turned fifty years old last week.

By this age, I should be that paunchy middle-aged guy, looking haggard, falling apart, displaying signs of fatigue, and complaining of a lack of sex drive. Those pharmaceutical mens ads remind me that my symptoms should include energy deficits, decreased strength, altered body composition, sexual dysfunction, and not surprisingly, depression. I should be, in this age of enlightenment, well into andropause, a clinically recognized term to describe the age related decline in testosterone. However, recent studies demonstrate that declining testosterone may not just be attributable to simply aging itself. So the question then becomes: Is there a way to stave off declines in testosterone production? YES. Lifestyle factors, particularly physical activity and diet, can influence testosterone levels.

I have not always had low body fat, above average muscle mass and a good and healthy outlook. I am a recent Success Story sculpted by Debbie Abbott and Rock Solid Nutrition & Wellness. If you’ve read and follow Debbie’s blog, you already know testosterone levels are falling worldwide at astronomical rates. Men, there is one very important hormone for us. It is Testosterone. Every man needs it. The older you get, the more you need it. You are dependent on it. You will be forever, regardless how you feel about it. Stop withering away and submitting pitifully to growing old, you can take matters into your own hands. Here’s how:

First, I know there are many men reading now, who have concluded immediately that I live in the gym, don’t work, and this lesson doesn’t apply in their lives. (That’s OK. You’re having an estrogen response- keep reading, I will explain later) Now I will tell you the fallacy of your argument. I am a top executive at a premier global corporation that requires and demands peak performance every day from its leadership.

I work sixty HOURS minimum each week.
I commute fifteen HOURS each week.
I workout in the gym ninety MINUTES each week.
No additional time in your life is required to make the changes needed to raise and maintain your testosterone to levels integral to health and well-being. Follow these guidelines and you can expect to feel like a MAN. As simple as that.

THE WORKOUT- Terrell Owens, Hershel Walker, Tim Tebow, and Suzanne Somers:
You do the WORK you get the RESULTS.

As a former collegiate athlete, I admire retired NFL players that have maintained their physiques well beyond their playing careers. Two of the fittest, Terrell Owens and Hershel Walker utilize bodyweight training, no equipment necessary, exercises put together in grueling workouts to push your body to the max, and it can be done just about anywhere. It’s all about getting back to basics. My workout consists almost entirely of sets of 100 push ups, pull ups, sit ups, thrust squats, and lunges. Get in, get it done, and get out. I’m rarely in the gym longer than thirty minutes. No social hour, no cell phone, no breaks- do your business and leave.

Make your workout mandatory in your daily routine. Resistance training is a must to raise and maintain testosterone levels. Research consistently shows that lifting weights improves androgen activity. A number of studies have shown significant increases in testosterone levels immediately following resistance training, especially bodybuilding type training using multiple sets of a moderate number of repetitions while taking fairly short rest periods.

The Tim Tebow workout contribution to my testosterone boost- when you think you can do no more reps, demand ten more. See above. I can now exceed 130 pushups and beyond in one set. Anything is possible when you push yourself to the max. Break through limiting beliefs.

Suzanne Somers was right. I believe in the Thigh Master. I call mine a squat rack.

Your Estrogen Talking:
“I don’t have time to go to the gym”
“I’m too tired to work out after a long day at work”
“I don’t have enough time to work out”

Your Testosterone Action:
Get up 30 minutes earlier and exercise before you shower and go to work. You will be more alert during the day and you’ll sleep better at night.

More Estrogen Talking (no man should ever think this, but they do):
“I don’t want to get muscular and bulky from weight training”

Immediate Testosterone Response:
“Muscle takes up less space than fat, making you smaller and allowing your clothes to fit better”
Start working out. Take back your testosterone.

THE DIET- Man, I feel like a Woman (…..not anymore)

Processed foods cause women to act like men and men to act like women.

If you have been following Debbie Abbott’s blog at Rock Solid Nutrition and Wellness, you know by now that soy is estrogen enhancing and will alter testosterone concentrations in a negative manner. Soy is in practically every boxed and processed food product. Wash it down with that bottled water in a plastic container, and you have been eating and drinking three estrogen laden meals every day of your life.

It is no wonder that research shows the prevalence of andropause is widespread amongst middle aged men. In fact more than thirty- nine percent of all males aged forty- five and older have total testosterone levels considered below normal.
All the modern food we men have been eating our entire lives has estrogenic effects which have resulted in advanced deterioration of your testosterone levels.

Thanks to Debbie’s protocol I have eliminated the following “foods” from my diet in the last three years, all of which suppressed my testosterone production:

I do not enter 95% of the aisles in the supermarket. If you are a man in the processed food aisle, you’re probably more of a woman than you think. Stay away from estrogenic products. Take Debbie’s advice, go to the shelves or your kitchen right now and look at the ingredients in your food.

Your Testosterone Action:
“Studies show an inverse relationship exists with high stress levels correlating with low testosterone levels. Bad nutrition choices will stress you more and undermine efforts to improve your well being”

Your Estrogen Resisting:
“It’s too hard to get started”

Immediate Testosterone Response
“Remember, it is only effort until it is routine. It is much easier to keep going once you’ve gotten over the hump of starting. If you are chronically stressed out, a symptom of low testosterone, here’s yet another reason to take charge and do something about it now”

And finally for today,

Another factor that seriously affects your testosterone levels negatively is the consumption of alcohol.
Alcohol intoxication is shown to inhibit testosterone production for hours after ingestion. Alcohol interferes with testosterone production in a number of ways, including negative alteration of enzymes involved in testosterone synthesis, suppression of steroidogenesis in the Leydig cells of the testes (yes, your balls), and a down regulation of luteinizing hormone receptors. So, if you are slamming drinks on a regular basis, you most likely have chronically suppressed testosterone levels.

Less clinical, much more meaningful for men:

Alcohol fuels low testosterone, resulting in visible disappointment when those special moments arise (or not) with your significant other. We’ll discuss bedroom topics on a later post. But for now, in closing remember the word soft. From your beer belly to your attitude, if you can call it soft, it’s an estrogenic effect.

This post is in response to some sad emails from those of you who’s head gets turned every time you pass the display counter at Starbucks, or a bag of Stacy’s pita chips, or cave when a bread basket wafts up your nose. “Good days” and “bad days” are going to be a thing of your past, because you can Change Your Brain Patterns – I promise! Repeat that to yourself out loud, because your brain believes what your mouth says. All Dieting has to stop, and healthy beliefs and facts need to be absorbed, if you want a different body.

The data consistently shows that Dieting Causes Weight Gain. It’s a sure-thing that if you try to restrict calories, there will be rebound binges.

Want a plan? Here you go:

Focus on changing your habits and thought patterns. Habits are the ONLY way to a lean, healthy body. Habits are what we do day after day after day, with very little effort. We develop healthy habits through planning, practice, and belief.

( If you believe that you can cancel out crappy food with starvation or heavy exercise, you’ll never keep your weight off. Ever. If you believe your body needs nutrient dense food to run well, you’ll be lean and healthy. )

Eat three meals a day. Don’t snack, at all. Make sure all your meals are at least moderate in size, bigger if you’re active. (Tiny diet meals cause snacking; let’s change this so you’re not high on blood sugar and insulin all day.) (Insulin is a “fat storage” hormone.)

Eat plenty of good fats, good proteins, TONS of vegetables, some fruit, some nuts and seeds, and some dairy if you’re good with that.

Eat on a schedule ( morning, noon, and night). Skipping a meal because you’re not hungry, maybe trying to “eat intuitively”?….Ugh. Disaster waiting to happen! Hunger influences our choices; wait til you’re hungry, and there’s a good chance your choices will be BAD.

Don’t rely on Willpower to get you through the day; willpower is in very finite supply. Using willpower depletes the glucose stores in your brain and leaves you feeling weak and depleted; what psychologists call, “decision fatigue“. Disaster waiting to happen – again! Work on developing new Habits and Thought Patterns.

Quit living by the seat of your pants. Plan, Plan, Plan, and then sit down and Plan. If you Fail to Plan, then just Plan to Fail, because changing your thought patterns and your habits isn’t going to happen naturally.

You think that you can’t do this because you’re too busy? Oh please! Get rid of that excuse! Tomorrow I’m posting a Success Story by my friend, Terry Kaye. She’s a mom of 3 boys, two of which have health issues, she works a few different jobs, she works out, and she cooks every day.

Who do you know who isn’t busy?? And don’t we want to teach our kids how to successfully handle normal, real life? Plan, Plan, Plan, and Plan.

Delete any thoughts of “making up for this later”, or starting over tomorrow/Sunday/Monday/the 1st etc. That’s ” Diet ” thinking, seriously. Diet thinking means you’re negotiating with yourself that if you eat crappy food now, you’ll starve yourself later; which would work if your body was a Calories In Calories Out system. It’s not. It’s a Chemistry Set. The chemistry you set in motion with lots of crappy carbs and toxic chemicals will NOT be balanced out with Starvation or Excessive Exercise. Ever.

Delete any thoughts that carby foods made with flour and sugar (muffins, donuts, cookies, etc) at Wegman’s, Whole Foods, or Trader Joe’s are Healthy because you bought them at Wegman’s, Whole Foods, or Trader Joe’s. Products made with grain flour and sugar are still products made with grain flour and sugar. They’ll spike your blood glucose, your insulin, and your cortisol, and put on belly fat. Junk food is junk food.

If you really want to change the way you habitually think about food, get in touch with me. The more you understand how your body works, the easier it is to make smart choices. Habits are the ONLY way to a lean, healthy body. Habits are what we do day after day after day, with very little thought or effort, and ZERO decision fatigue. Does it take a few months to change your habits? Yes. Looking back though, what’s a few months. Ask yourself, where do you want to be Next Year on This Date. Exactly where you are right now, doing the same old habits and patterns; or lean, healthy, and using newly instilled habits? Ask yourself this: how long have you been using the same old Diet methods to try and change your body? How many years? What’s the definition of Insanity? Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.

Everyone is capable of change, but doing the same old thing will always bring about the same old results. Commit to Real Whole Food, and commit to changing your thoughts and habits, you can do this!

Where’s Mark’s Man Post? It was due on April 13! We hit a snag with our weekend plans. Our epileptic daughter Amanda ended up in the hospital much of the weekend with “break-thru” seizures. She’s pretty beat up. She was put on a new anti-seizure drug a month ago which caused such a depressive state of mind; she quit cold turkey last Sunday. She should have weaned off the brain med; however, she’s had plenty of seizures when she’s been on her meds too.

Epilepsy Sucks. That’s all I can say. No, actually, I have to say she’s amazing. Last night, after a she got home and took a nap, because there’s no sleeping in a hospital, she worked on a problem set due at 11 today. And this morning she’s going to get up and make the walk across campus for her 11 o’clock class. She’s the toughest person I know.

Testosterone post coming soon, I’ll let you know the date.

In honor of meds causing side effects, today’s post will be about constipation, Miralax, and it’s dangerous side effects; inspired by the lady in the bed beside Amanda. Her name was Susan and she had a brain tumor that was causing seizures. Her most recent seizure, that landed her in the hospital, was “different” . Her words. (There’s ZERO privacy in the rooms, so I heard all her conversations with the doctors, plus her conversations with her husband and daughters.) Susan’s on Miralax twice a day, and has been for MONTHS, and Colase, once a day, but now will take that twice a day also, per doctors orders. Poor thing can’t poop, probably a combination of her meds and Standard American Diet (SAD). ( She was eating pudding, fiber cereal, and pancakes, with a diet pepsi, in the hospital bed.)

Did you know Miralax, an incredibly common laxative, has had a FDA warning on it since 2011, stating that it’s correlated with “NEUROPSYCHIATRIC EVENTS“? Besides Miralax, this warning also applies to these other meds: Movicol, Dulcolax, Colyte, Colovage, Co-Lav, Clensz-Lyte, ClearLax, GoLYTELY, GaviLyte C, GlycoLax, Go-Evac, GlycoPrep, E-Z-Em Fortrans, Halflytely, Lax-a-Day, LaxLyte, MoviPrep, Macrogol, NuLytely, OCL, Peg-Lyte, Prep Lyte, Softlax, TriLyte, and all other brands with Polyethylene Glycol 3350 (PEG for short) as their active ingredient. PEG breaks down to toxic byproducts that first affect the central nervous system (CNS), then the heart, and finally the kidneys.

People give this stuff to babies and children, with a doctors blessing. Please read on, because American’s spend more than $700 MILLION on laxatives a year, and STILL remain the most constipated people on earth. We’re also the most medicated people on earth, consume the most fiber supplements, and consume the most high carbohydrate fibrous grain products. Not the most Fruit, Vegetables, Water, or Probiotic Foods, which are actually the Fix For Constipation. Of course, there’s not a lot of money to be made on Real Whole Foods, so Big Phuvernment’s* not going to be pushing that real hard any time soon.

PEG is classified as a “NeuroToxin”. The scary term, “neuropsychiatric events”? That means “neurological conditions”, such as autism, MS, Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s, seizures, etc. (Miralax and it’s sisters work by artificially stimulating the nervous system so that you can squeeze out a poop. Apparently, listening to Susan, it doesn’t always work.) PEG has several other side effects that don’t include the Nervous system, and I hope you read about them all here; medications always come with side effects, even meds that are deemed so normal that they have a tag line like this: “MiraLAX® is safe and effective – and available without a prescription.” It’s not safe. The FDA has ONLY approved it for adults, and ONLY for a maximum of 7 days. Pregnant women and children who’ve used it should be very worried, as it’s consequences for small, undeveloped or developing brains is very serious. Please read the full report here. There’s this blind trust that we’ve put in the medical system and pharmaceuticals that is very, very undeserved. Know what you’re putting in your body!

There’s NO MEDICATIONS that don’t have SOME negative effect on your digestive system: they either slow motility of the bowels, or affect the pH of the gut, or both. And I mean, NO MEDICATION. Some of the worst offenders? Anti-depressants, pain meds, antibiotics, and diuretics. Again though, Every Single Medication affects the gut in one way or the other.

Some people are going to read this and think, No Way. If the medication was that bad or that dangerous, it wouldn’t be on the market. Wrong. Money Talks,… loudly. In 2012 a petition was filed with the FDA in an effort to get PEG out of our medicine and FOOD supply: For the pdf look here.

“As of March 2012, the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System showed 2257 reported adverse events related (in any way) to PEG products – up from 7 in 2001. Included in the adverse events reported are serious kidney, urinary, bowel, blood, skin, and neuropsychiatric symptoms – and at least 3 children’s deaths.”

Note the word, “products”, because PEG’s not just in laxatives, it’s in several other products also: “food grade polyethylene glycol (under the Carbowax Sentry trade name) is commonly added to chewing gums, table-top sweeteners, and energy drinks. It is also used as a base in solid and liquid soaps, shampoos, bath and shower gels; body and face creams and lotions; toothpastes, ointments and suppositories; as a tablet binder in drugs and supplements; as a lubricant in vaginal gels and eye drops; and as a solvent in cough medicines and elixirs. ”

The resource for this post is a scientist named Konstantin Monastyrsky. He runs a site called “gutsense” and it contains more specific and applicable information about the gut and constipation than I’ve seen anywhere else. You should really check it out if you want to learn the super gritty nitty details of what you can do if you have chronic constipation.

In the meantime, what about Amanda’s reliance on pharmaceuticals for her epilepsy? We can’t stand it. She’s been on a pretty solid ketogenic diet for almost a year, and she doesn’t drink alcohol, which has to help, but she’s in college. College life is NOT conducive to epilepsy, at all. The stress, the deadlines, the lack of sleep. We feel tied to these horrible drugs yet want more than anything to get off them. In her own words, she “wonders who she is if she wasn’t on brain medications.”…. We’ve been seriously investigating Medical Marijuana, which isn’t legal in Virginia yet, but hopefully will be soon. What is legal is Hemp oil ( it’s lacks THC, which is the illegal substance, and contains Cannabidoil, which is deemed by some scientists to be the most Anti-Inflammatory substance in the world.) We’ve ordered some and will be trying this in conjunction with her meds. We’ve got to get the laws changed so that more studies can be conducted in the US. Other countries are light years ahead on this and so far, the science looks incredibly promising. All neurological conditions and cancer seem to be the main focus, and there’s some great information on this site here.